TORONTO, ONTARIO - One thing I neglected to mention in my post earlier this week on the best place for Muslims to live is that while I crossed paths with quite a number of Muslims in the United States and had conversations with them about the impact of their faith, I have never had such a conversation in Canada. In fact, I suspect that no Canadian Muslims are reading this blog, either, since neither public nor private comments were generated pointing out that the post missed a major point--Canadians as individual citizens may be less fearful and more accepting of Muslims than their southern neighbors, but the government has clearly demonstrated a bias against them in matters of diplomacy and citizenship.
The examples of this apparent bias just in the past two years could fill a week of these posts. Omar Khadr remains the only western prisoner remaining in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp run by the United States. Would the Canadian government really have ignored court rulings saying that they had to seek Khadr's extradition if he had been of European descent? I doubt it. Most recently, Suaad Mohamud was arrested in Kenya for trying to return to Canada because officials suspected she was really her sister. It's unthinkable that the same thing would have happened to someone of European descent. For more examples, just check out this essay from the Ryerson Free Press.
Opposition leaders have tried to force the government to act or explain itself in cases including those of Khadr and Mohamud to no avail. Some, including the editors of the Ryerson Free Press, have suggested that Muslims (and also all those of Arab descent) are treated as less than citizens by the Canadian government. Whether true or not, certainly a number of Muslims do feel that this is the case.
Of course, it wouldn't take all that much to change the situation. No laws need to change. A new government--or even this the current Conservative one, if it so chose--could make a point of publicly stating that there is only one kind of Canadian citizenship that includes Muslims, take action on open cases like Khadr, and then the attractiveness of Canada for Muslims would shine through. Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal Party leader, has used similar language in some recent speeches. However, with the current plunge of the Liberal Party in the polls, a change in outward stance of the government is not likely.
So, regardless of the suitability of the society on a day-to-day basis, the perception (and perhaps reality) that the government is biased against Muslims probably ensures that they prefer the United States or other countries over Canada, completely debunking my thesis from the post earlier this week.
Showing posts with label Muslims. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Muslims. Show all posts
Friday, October 9, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
Culture: Real Best Place for Muslims to Live?
TORONTO, ONTARIO - In a recent opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor, George Washington University lecturer Dr. Merve Kavakci made the case that the United States may be the best place in the world for Muslims to live. Kavakci pointed out that Muslims are able to exercise their religion more freely in the United States than many Muslim countries. As he put it:
The callers were revealing. Even in an area regarded as one of the most progressive in the United States, nobody questioned the premise of the question--it was accepted that Muslims were feared. Some callers demonstrated gross misunderstanding of the faith that Walter tried to address, most significantly the idea of the "infidel." Christians and Jews, as "people of the book," are not "infidels" to the Muslim. The underlying theme brought out many times over the course of the broadcast was that radical leaders were defining many faiths--not just Islam--inappropriately in the media, leading to broad misunderstandings.
The discussion rang true to me. There were Muslims in several of my dorms during my undergraduate years at Stanford University. It was clear to me that they had to constantly fight to be understood. Even as someone sensitive to their struggles, I sometimes contributed to the problem. As the editor of a weekly news summary that was fairly widely distributed on several college campuses, I would sometimes (usually very late on my Saturday night deadline) use "Muslim" when "Islamist" or a non-religious term like "radical" would have been the appropriate term, and there were multiple times I needed to send out a correction. The culture was so strong that I had to be on constant alert to not repeat mistakes made by other media organizations.
At the time, other than the individual efforts of the Muslims I knew, there seemed to be little organized effort to promote mutual understanding. That came out as a theme in the God Talk show on Sunday as well--Walters himself was trying to educate his audience, but he could point to few other places in the media where that was taking place. If I were a Muslim in the United States, the fact that the majority population feared my faith and efforts to promote mutual understanding were so few and far between, that would disquiet me, if not downright scare me.
There is at least one high-profile effort to promote mutual understanding in Canada. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation runs a situation comedy entitled Little Mosque on the Prairie. The premise of the show is the struggle of Muslims to live a substantially non-Muslim world in the fictional town of Mercy, Saskatchewan. While the show is fundamentally a comedy, and rarely delves deeply into the cultural struggles, that's rather the point. The show is showing a variety of Muslim and non-Muslim characters interacting and learning about each other, showing that everyone's struggles are fundamentally similar. That probably does more to reduce fear of Muslims in Canada than anything other than interacting with Muslim neighbors could do.
Thus, I would take Kavakci's thesis and extend it one point further. The best place for Muslims to live just might be Canada--where they have the same civil rights they also enjoy in the United States, but there are at least some efforts to ensure that they will not be feared and might be better understood by the population at large.
Think about it: In Turkey, where the vast majority of the population is Muslim, you will not find a lawyer with a beard or a student at a university wearing a head scarf, but you can find plenty in New York City. In Tunisia, you won't see a religiously dressed physician at university hospitals – but you can in Alabama.Most of Kavakci's arguments focused on the legal rights that Muslims--and everyone else--has in the United States. Yet, I'm not so certain that I'd really want to be a Muslim in the United States. Last Sunday, God Talk with Brent Walters from KGO Newstalk 810 in San Francisco spent three hours discussing Islam. Following up on an idea that had come up many times previously on his weekly show, he opened with the question "Why is it that people are afraid of Muslims in the United States?"
The callers were revealing. Even in an area regarded as one of the most progressive in the United States, nobody questioned the premise of the question--it was accepted that Muslims were feared. Some callers demonstrated gross misunderstanding of the faith that Walter tried to address, most significantly the idea of the "infidel." Christians and Jews, as "people of the book," are not "infidels" to the Muslim. The underlying theme brought out many times over the course of the broadcast was that radical leaders were defining many faiths--not just Islam--inappropriately in the media, leading to broad misunderstandings.
The discussion rang true to me. There were Muslims in several of my dorms during my undergraduate years at Stanford University. It was clear to me that they had to constantly fight to be understood. Even as someone sensitive to their struggles, I sometimes contributed to the problem. As the editor of a weekly news summary that was fairly widely distributed on several college campuses, I would sometimes (usually very late on my Saturday night deadline) use "Muslim" when "Islamist" or a non-religious term like "radical" would have been the appropriate term, and there were multiple times I needed to send out a correction. The culture was so strong that I had to be on constant alert to not repeat mistakes made by other media organizations.
At the time, other than the individual efforts of the Muslims I knew, there seemed to be little organized effort to promote mutual understanding. That came out as a theme in the God Talk show on Sunday as well--Walters himself was trying to educate his audience, but he could point to few other places in the media where that was taking place. If I were a Muslim in the United States, the fact that the majority population feared my faith and efforts to promote mutual understanding were so few and far between, that would disquiet me, if not downright scare me.
There is at least one high-profile effort to promote mutual understanding in Canada. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation runs a situation comedy entitled Little Mosque on the Prairie. The premise of the show is the struggle of Muslims to live a substantially non-Muslim world in the fictional town of Mercy, Saskatchewan. While the show is fundamentally a comedy, and rarely delves deeply into the cultural struggles, that's rather the point. The show is showing a variety of Muslim and non-Muslim characters interacting and learning about each other, showing that everyone's struggles are fundamentally similar. That probably does more to reduce fear of Muslims in Canada than anything other than interacting with Muslim neighbors could do.
Thus, I would take Kavakci's thesis and extend it one point further. The best place for Muslims to live just might be Canada--where they have the same civil rights they also enjoy in the United States, but there are at least some efforts to ensure that they will not be feared and might be better understood by the population at large.
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